India’s callousness towards war prisoners

Prepare yourselves for a bit of a shock and it has
nothing to do with the coronavirus. But it is, nonetheless, distressing. As
many as 83 Indian soldiers are said to be in Pakistani captivity, some from as
far back as the 1965 and 1971 wars, and it appears successive governments have
either forgotten about them or not strained themselves to get them back. In
fact, 83 is the Indian government’s official count.

Chander Suta Dogra’s book on this tragic, if bewildering,
situation reveals a story that hasn’t got the attention it deserves. ‘Missing
in Action: The Prisoners Who Never Came Back’ is full of heartrending accounts
of soldiers wrongly presumed dead, others said to be missing in action when
there’s credible proof they’re in Pakistan, and some who are now certain to be
dead but we continue to tell their next of kin they’re prisoners of war (POWs).

Nothing illustrates this better than the story of Major
Ashok Suri. Initially, it was said he died in action on December 5, 1971, only
for his father to receive four telegrams saying something else while Radio
Pakistan claimed he was alive. After personal enquiries seemed to affirm that,
his family received two letters which handwriting experts confirmed were
written by him. Satinder Lambah, then a junior diplomat in Pakistan but later
high commissioner, is certain Suri was alive in the mid-70s. Unofficially,
Amnesty International concurred. Yet it took the government over three years to
change his classification from killed to missing-in-action. If it had done so earlier,
Dogra says, we might possibly have got him back. But as long as India
maintained he was dead, Pakistan felt no compulsion to return him.

Dogra’s book discusses five reasons why these 83 soldiers
languish in Pakistani prisons. First, when POWs were exchanged in 1972, the
Indian government was more concerned about ensuring Pakistani recognition of
Bangladesh. As a result, it did not properly ensure all Indian POWs had been
returned. This was not a top priority. Second, India does not follow the Israeli
practice of exchanging a disproportionate number of enemy POWs for a smaller
number of its own. When Pakistan suggested a one-for-three exchange, India
rejected it. Third, India doesn’t believe in taking this matter to the
International Court of Justice or involving third governments because it fears
this could provide Pakistan an opportunity to internationalise Kashmir.

If these three reasons reflect the perverse attitude of
Indian governments, Dogra identifies two more which suggest Pakistani mischief.
First, Pakistan probably retained a few Indian POWs as bargaining chips in case
its own officers were tried for war crimes after the 1971 war. Those trials
never happened but the retained POWs were forgotten about. Ultimately, she
writes: “Their poor mental and physical condition, possibly as a result of
years of torture and injuries, made it difficult for Pakistan to admit their
presence and return them.”

The second Pakistan-related reason is particularly
intriguing. She believes some POWs, such as Lance Naik Jaspal Singh, may have
been sent to West Asian countries such as Oman to cover up the embarrassment of
retaining Indian POWs years after the war ended. Once out of sight, they were
also out of mind.

However, pause before you jump to nasty conclusions about
our neighbour. The opposite story is equally true. They believe 18 of their
soldiers are in India’s custody. And we’ve been just as unhelpful! There are
times when our governments are uncannily similar.

Now think of the families devastated on both sides.
Sometimes they’re told their kin are dead only to get hope they’re alive, or
missing in action only to discover they’re prisoners, or listed alive only to
receive posthumous awards for gallantry. They’ve suffered for decades because
their governments can’t be bothered to establish the truth, while soldiers who
fought for their country are forgotten by their countrymen. The Kohima War
Memorial says “for your tomorrow we gave our today.” In this instance, a better
epitaph would be “for our today we denied you a tomorrow.”